Biography book about albert einstein

Your first book choice is Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison.

This is an absolutely brilliant investigation into two related discoveries that deal with how you define what is simultaneous.

Poincaré helped us get to the notion of time zones and longitude in the 19th century. Einstein was working as a patent clerk in , because he couldn’t get an academic job, and Galison shows how he was looking at a lot of applications for ways to synchronise clocks because the Swiss had gone on standard time zones and, because they were very Swiss, they wanted the clock to strike seven in Bern at the exact same time as it struck seven in Zurich.

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In order to synchronise the clocks you have to send a signal between them and that signal travels at the speed of light. So Einstein had to visualise how you define what is simultaneous by using a light signal. He realised that what is simultaneous to two people standing still is different